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by Ian Stansel
A contemporary Western debut about two brothers locked in a deadly feud, a woman on horseback trailing her husband's killer, and the inescapable ties of home and family.
When Silas Van Loy flees home on horseback to avoid capture for his brother's murder, he is soon followed by both the police and his brother's wife, Lena, who is intent on exacting revenge. She reluctantly lets her trusted stable assistant join her in a journey across the wilds of Northern California in the hopes of catching Silas for one final showdown. Stansel follows the chase and shares the story of the brothers' rise from hardscrabble childhood to their reign as the region's preeminent horse trainers, tracking the tense sibling rivalry that ultimately leads to the elder's death.
A fully realized tale that challenges notions of the modern West, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo will satisfy fans of Kent Haruf, Larry McMurtry, Molly Gloss, and Smith Henderson, and establish Stansel as a new voice in this grand tradition.
"Starred Review. The occasional scene seems extended, and readers will anxiously wonder whether these horse-loving fools would hurt their charges for revenge, yet Stansel has written a captivating novel, elegantly spare in language but big in purpose." - Library Journal
"A stirring narrative of hostility, pursuit, and the desire for vengeance." - Kirkus
"Stansel's portrayal of violence and loopiness in one of the world's most beautiful places makes for an unusual but captivating crime story infused with western tropes." - Booklist
"One of the most compelling novels I've read in a long time." - Eowyn Ivey, author of the To the Bright Edge of the World and the Pulitzer finalist The Snow Child
"The Last Cowboys of the San Geronimo is a contemporary Western with biblical implications chocked with passion, regret and the things that work on you like a burr under a saddle blanket." - Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries, the basis for Netflix original series Longmire
"Written with the headlong pace of the cross-country manhunt it describes, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo fuses the classic Cain-and-Abel tale with the gripping tension of a modern revenge thriller. From the groomed world of equestrian eventing to the tough mountain trails of Northern California, Ian Stansel sends a resilient horsewoman in blood-hot pursuit of personal justice, and at the same time shows us that the redemptive partnership of horse and rider can transcend even the most bitter of animosities." - Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses
"Ian Stansel's debut dives headlong into the anachronism of the modern cowboy - a beautiful and brutal novel about time: the expanse of it, the burden of it, but, more than anything, the crushing realization when it grows short." - James Scott, author of The Kept
"Although set in the twentieth-first century, this fine novel has a mythic power and resonance. Ian Stansel is a gifted young writer who starts his novel at a gallop and never lets up until the story's final reckoning." - Ron Rash, author of Serena, Above the Waterfall, The Risen, and more
"Ian Stansel's debut novel is so rich in evocative detail and gripping incident that I thought at several moments I was riding fast next to its sharply drawn characters across rough ground. Like All the Pretty Horses before it, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo inks an indelible portrait of a hard, gorgeous world that is both timeless and in deep, momentous flux. I'm grateful to Mr. Stansel for having written it." - Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and The Evening Road
This information about The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ian Stansel is the author of the collection of stories Everybody's Irish, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham prize for debut fiction. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Joyland, Ecotone, and Cincinnati Review. His nonfiction has appeared in Salon,CutBank, and The Good Men Project. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where he was the editor of Gulf Coast.He currently serves as assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville.
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